This site is now thirteen years old. Like I’ve said in the past, there isn’t a hard date for launching the site, but the very first post is dated September 1st 2005, so that’s when I observe the site anniversary. Let’s mark this occasion by digging into the database and answering some basic questions. Where does my readership come from? Am I really cussing more these days? Am I becoming more long-winded? Am I putting out less content? What’s the overall ratio of this site in terms of HTML / images downloaded? What OS and web browsers do my readers prefer?

First, I should note that these numbers a going to be very rough. I changed web hosts about a month ago and began using a content distribution network a couple of weeks ago, and so my current data doesn’t go back very far. We’re dealing with a small sample size. We can’t read too much into these numbers, but we can still, you know, read them.

First, the question of OS…

No OS/2 Warp? Pity.

Huh. 22% Linux users? I wasn’t expecting that. Globally, Windows has just over 80% of the market share. Given how much this site focuses on the PC market, I’d expect my site to lean towards Windows more than the global average. Instead, Windows has less than two-thirds of the market.

If only the global averages looked this good, Microsoft might be a little less complacent.

No Netscape Navigator? That's probably for the best.

If you’d asked me to predict the browser ranking, this is exactly what I would have guessed: Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and IE, in that order.

Poor Opera. I remember it was my go-to browser for a couple of years. I think I left it for Chrome. Looks like I wasn’t the only one.

The above numbers were pulled from my hosting stats, and thus suffer from the small sample size I warned about above. The next two stats come from Cloudflare, which is the CDN I use. The idea of a CDN is that it takes a snapshot of my site and distributes it to its servers around the world. So when all ten thousand of you knock on my door each day, my humble little shared server doesn’t have to bear the full brunt of it. Instead, each of you gets the snapshot from the closest Cloudflare server. It also means that if anyone attacks this site with a botnet, the bots end up spreading their attacks over dozens of strong servers rather than ganging up on my weak one.

First up, here’s what Cloudflare reports about my visitors:

Nobody from Wakanda? Too bad.

No surprises there. It’s mostly the Anglosphere, with some Europeans. I’m a little surprised at how much traffic I have coming from China. You might assume those are “Chinese hackers”, but check it out…

Bozhe moi!

China barely registers on the threat scale. Also, despite Russia’s reputation as the great hacking boogeyman, Russia pretty much leaves this site alone.

I’m really surprised to see I’ve got more Germans than Canadians. I should check on that in a few months and see if those numbers hold.

That’s enough of the vague numbers. Now let’s go and get some hard facts out of…

The Database

Every few months I see a comment to the effect of “You seem to be swearing more lately”. I often wonder how true it is.

For the record, I’m not against cussing in a moral sense. I think there’s a time and place for rough language and I very much agree with Stephen Fry that it’s a powerful linguistic tool to help us communicate.

However, I’m also wary of doing it too much. I have a reputation for being excessively negative and I don’t want to be dismissed as someone who does exaggerated nerdrage as performance art. A lot of people are already working in that spaceWith Zero Punctuation being the ur-example of the form. and I don’t want to get lumped in with them. Furthermore, cursing is powerful directly in proportional to how rare it is. Too many cuss words placed too close together over too trivial a topic and they lose their potency. Dropping the effenheimer is like using your special ability in a videogame. You should save it for when it really counts, and then it should go on cooldown for a while.

I’m careful about my usage because it’s very easy for this thing to become a crutch. “Hm. I’m having trouble making my point and I don’t have anything witty to say. I’ll drop a ‘fuck’ in the middle of this otherwise clinical analysis and that should distract from the fact that my argument is a little toothless.”

Am I getting more swear-y? Yes and no.

But to measure this, we have to decide what words are “serious” curse words and which ones are minor curse words. Damn and hell are used so casually these days that I doubt anyone would count them. At the other extreme are a few slurs that I never use, so it’s not worth looking for them. Many words – such as dick – have non-profane usages and can’t be enumerated automatically because you have to examine the surrounding context. But there are a few words that are unambiguously coarse and can be counted as profanity using simple string comparison.

select count(ID) from (SELECT ID FROM wp_posts WHERE post_author='1'
AND post_status='publish' AND (post_content LIKE "%fuck%" OR post_content
LIKE '%shit%' OR post_content LIKE '%bitch%' OR post_content LIKE '%asshole%')
AND post_date >= '2005-01-01' AND post_date < '2006-01-01' ORDER BY
post_date LIMIT 199990) as x;

Note that this will only count posts that are authored by me and which contain one of the four naughty words: fuck, shit, bitch, and asshole. This means that if I make a single post that’s just the word “fuck” repeated 1,000 times, it still – as Gimli would say – only counts as one. The verdict:

23 profane posts so far this year, and almost none of them were about Mass Effect.

The five-year stretch from 2009 to 2013 is pretty amazing. For five years I held steady at 18-20 cursing posts per year. Then I went pretty wild in the stretch from 2014 to 2017, although it looks like I calmed down this year.

How am I doing in terms of overall words per year?

184,000 words so far this year. And hardly any of them were about Mass Effect!

Obviously 2018 isn’t over and I’ve got four more months of content to post before we see the final tally, but my guess is I’m going to end the year a little bit short of the 294,000 words I posted last year. I expect I’ll be happy with my output when it’s all over.

Now a related question: How often am I posting this year?

136 posts so far this year. And hardly any of them were about Mass Effect!

If we combine the last two numbers using mathematical wizardry, we get the following chart:

Clearly this growth is unsustainable.

Obviously if you post the same number of words over a smaller number of posts, you’ll end up with longer posts overall. Again, the spike over the last couple of years is mostly due to the fact that I’m no longer posting little 300 word blurbs under Spoiler Warning videos three times a week.

So that’s a bunch of numbers in chart form. I hope you found those interesting. I’ll check on a few of these stats after the new year and we can see how it all turned out.

On the flipside, Spoiler Warning without Shamus is not the same thing. I still like it, but I miss the story nitpicking our gracious host could bring to the table.

Same thing for the Diecast – new Diecast is not what old Diecast was, and honestly without Ruts and Chris it’s not for me. The two-dudes-talking format only works if I specifically enjoy the banter between said two dudes – new Diecast really needs a third host, something more like ATP than Hello Internet. Meanwhile Spodcast feels more like the direct descendent of the Diecast, but with the same caveat as SW :(

Also, I miss having an outlet where I could read Ruts writing without paying $5 a month. Not that $5 a month is unreasonable, just that I’m already supporting other people and it adds up.

I missed that series too, so I went and checked Rutskarn’s patreon, which has no Overhaulout posts, so I’m pretty sure it’s just a dead series. I never really watched spoiler warning but I’m only now realizing that that split is why Ruts doesn’t contribute here anymore and that’s a shame on its own.

You’d have to check the comment sections for that week; I got the feeling Rutskarn was sticking around just to finish the series, and then there was some additional controversy in a comment section that week and he decided it wasn’t worth it.

I’ve got the same feelings where neither the NuDiecast nor the Spodcast really scratch the itch that the Diecast Classic™ used to scratch.

With the Diecast 2: Electric Boogaloo, it’s not just that it’s “two dudes talking”, but it’s two people talking who tend to mostly agree with each other and seem to have fairly similar tastes. It’s not like Ye Olde Diecaste was filled with huge debates, but it was pretty common to get dramatically different takes depending on who was talking about it. And it had more topical diversity as well: Diecast II has more techie talk (which is good) and a lot of talk about proc-gen games (Minecraft, Factorio, NMS, KSP), while Diecast Classico covered everything from Nintendo games, to Mystic Messenger, to more art house stuff (usually courtesy of Campster), to random digressions about anthropology to gripping narrations of home plumbing.

It’s entirely possible that the new formula is great, and it’s just not for me, but I for one wouldn’t mind it if Shamus tried to shake things up a bit.

Anyway, sorry to write something somewhat negative on an anniversary post. Congrats on thirteen years, hoping that the next thirteen are even better!

I too, miss some of the old Diecast chemistry. Specifically, I’d like more programming / tech talk, but I might be in the minority there. I really like it when Shamus and Paul talk about programming / mods / etc, and would enjoy more of it.

I was never fond of it to begin with. It was too raw, too unedited, and Josh’s total insistence on bunny hopping everywhere made it neigh impossible to watch without becoming sea sick. When I play first person perspective games with someone watching (like my wife), I make an effort of moving the camera more slowly, and as little as possible.

It also really did not help that it was completely improvised, there were no topics, nobody had done any research and most discussions would ramble about and deteriorate into pun contests.

Since we’re dragging this particular cadaver out (I hope this isn’t an actual issue with Shamus, feel free to delete at least my comment if you’d rather we didn’t).

What you say absolutely did happen but I assume it’s a case of varying mileage as to me it only became an issue in some lategame episodes when they have run out of things to say, otherwise it was often fun ways to fill the time between story bits (but then I actually really like puns, might be because I’m not a native speaker of English and Polish is not quite as conductive for this kind of wordplay), I regret that I have not since found a Let’s Play that would do this kind of full game analysis mixed with this kind of dynamic between hosts.

Edit: also, I was usually running it in the background and switching it to the top only when I heard something amusing happened or I didn’t know what was going on-screen, so that might have spared me the bunnyhopping issue.

For me personally, as much as Rutskarn can be fun, he also kinda doesn’t know when to quit it and let the grownups talk. Which caused quite a few cases, where he’ll banter all over some segment that had potentially interesting bits, but those wouldn’t be talked about because he is clinging strong to the mic on the stage.

Yeah, I was looking at that distribution and wondering where the mobile users were. Does Android report as Linux, though? It’s Linux-based, sure, but it’s got its own layer of stuff built on top of it.

Well ‘uname’ on my phone says ‘Linux’. However I’m not sure how representative my phone is at this point. I have modified it to the point where it’s more Linux than Android, only really keep Android present for phone features and to remain compatible with any Android software I might want to use (SensorBox was a godsend when I broke my level on a job site before).

It must be included in one of the categories above; Linux seems like the likely suspect. The only other unknowns together make up 1.3% (Unknown + Unknown Unix System) which would imply that iPhone (iOS) visitors are almost 11x the numbers of Android visitors.

I think you’re right to call much of that “Linux” number Android users. Then one can extrapolate a little, divide “mobile views” from “desktop views” and get some figures that somewhat match Shamus’s expected numbers for Windows/notwindows split.

I guess it’s useful to remember that “Linux” is really the name of the kernal, not any single operating system per se. So saying “Android counts as Linux” is exactly as true and correct as saying “Debian, Ubuntu, or Fedora count as Linux”—all four of them run the Linux kernel, but none of them is an operating system known as Linux.

That said it would definitely be intriguing to know how many people are accessing the site from mobile Linux devices, and how many from more sedentary ones. (I do both myself, I’m typing this on my Debian gaming rig but often read the site on my Android phone during my commute.)

I’d be interested in seeing the number of curse words relative to the total number of words. I guess that would be a better measure of how much you’re cursing. Generally, if your posts become longer, that means there may be more opportunities to use a curse, which in turn will produce more curse posts, even without increasing the curse density. Or you might be spreading them more evenly around? Also, of course the number of posts with curses will vary with the total number of posts.

And I wish I was visiting here from Linux (Desktop), as I’m a huge proponent of it, but there are some technical, bureaucratic and logistic reasons why I must have Windows running, and browse from there.

I also thought that curse words per total words would have been a better metric, but you beat me to the comment! Although curse words per post might be better, since the thing that would get you swearing, would be whatever topic you’re writing about, not necessarily the length of the post? Now I don’t know anymore… :)

Poor Opera. I remember it was my go-to browser for a couple of years. I think I left it for Chrome.

Opera is really weird.It used to do so many innovative things that other browsers,including chrome,copied from it.And then opera decided to copy chrome,to the point that it is now basically chrome,with a few tweaks.

Yeah, I used to use Opera exclusively for years, but then they decided to get rid of the integrated eMail client and switched their engine to Chromium. If I wanted a Chrome browser, I’d use Chrome. I am using Firefox now.

I’m in an odd position where I’m using Firefox for most things (including visiting this blog) but Chrome for some, particularly Twitch and YouTube. Far as I remember the reason might have been that waaaay back in the day if I had everything set up on Firefox “just the way I liked it” but when I switched audio devices from my speakers to my headphones I had to for some reason close and restart Firefox for the change to stick and I used to listen to stuff late at night while effectively sharing a room with a housemate. I could definitely switch to either of the two by now but I have all my settings, plugins, bookmarks etc. set up for one purpose or the other and I use the browsers largely on muscle memory that a switch would screw up.

I used to love Opera, and used it as my main browser for a few years, but the problem with having its own rendering engine meant that a lot of websites wouldn’t work with it, and it wasn’t always obvious that this was the case leading to a lot of “Why isn’t this dumb site working?” only to discover “Oh, it works perfectly in Chrome/Firefox/IE/etc.” So I always had other browsers around as backup for those cases, and when it had its big re-invention of itself I re-evaluated and realized I could just live with Chrome and stop worrying about sites not working.

What language barrier? Practically everyone codes in English (let’s not speak about Microsoft Excel, please), and so practically all German-speaking coders/modders, and many German-speaking video game enthusiasts, are fluent in it. Also, German localisations of English games range from (occasionally) competent to a raging dumpster fire of aggressive incoherence, so it’s not unheard of for German players to play in English anyway.

Indeed, I also try and avoid German localization by now. In the past, I used to view my movies and play my games in German, also read my books that way.
The more fluid I became in English, the more I switched over to original versions.
Honestly, I feel German localization has deteriorated over the years and by now I don’t trust them to do anything properly at all. Since I’m in many cases also made to pay more for a localization I neither want or need I will in many cases order my books as imports. They are often way cheaper due to Germany having the so called “Buchpreisbindung”, which prohibits stores from selling books which have officially been published in Germany from being sold at a discount, except for damaged goods. Since many English books are not officially licensed in Germany, they are excempt from it.
Many a show, movie, game etc. tends to have some major screwups that highlight the issues in exciting new ways.
My favorite example remains the localization of Arrow, where I had to switch from German to English within 3 minutes of the very first episode, when the German Version made Stephen Amell speak a miniscule amount of SPANISH (“De nada”) for absolutely no reason at all, only to be asked “You speak Russian?”. I really preferred suffering Amell’s horrible butchering of the Russian language (especially his pronounciation) over the total anarchy I feared would be unleashed in German translation.
Another example is the amazing localization of Pillars of Eternity, where the dialog sometimes would show untranslated code in the middle of a fantasy RPG. That seriously screws with my immersion.
I don’t expect quality from German localizations anymore, and therefore try and avoid them in the first place.

I’ve seen Python code that you can literally read as an English sentence while still being syntactically correct and actually explaining its own functionality without the need for comments, so I guess that’s a yes??

As a site with a greater percentage of tech-savvy people who will actually recognize the problems with Windows, and possibly even be comfortable enough to switch platforms, I am not surprised in the slightest that Windows user percentage would be lower than average (though the gap is wider than I’d expect, and could even out with more data). One day I will have to put up or shut up- though I’d like to have some faint hope that the windows/linux thing I vaguely heard Valve was working on might actually be a thing and I’ll be able to jump instead of learning to juggle.

I’ve been finding the converse in recent years. Tech-savvy people tend to avoid the pit-traps (“Click here to make it bigger” or “You’re PC is Enffected!! Downlaod this Anty Avirus Now!!!!!!) and find the convenience and ubiquity of Windows well …. convenient. The others seem to go to Mac and iDevice, fewer and fewer go to Linux, except as it underlies Android.

I did wonder if it the raw hits exclude crawlers, because a lot of those will be *nix based.

Valve’s integration of a custom version of WINE (called Proton) into Steam to allow auto-playing of Windows games on Linux is indeed “a thing.” And given that I’ve started seeing Windows-only games showing up in my library again it seems to have been pushed out of beta to the main client. I haven’t actually tried it yet (need to get around to updating my graphics drivers), but it’s apparently moderately successful out-of-the-box from what I’ve seen on the web.

Yeah, yeah. I was trying to lull tovarisch Young into a false sense of security so that we could gather our forces in secret and then pounce, but that plan is pretty much screwed now, bratva. The great Russian boogeyman foiled once again.

I thought I’d Nevski you getting in the way of a pun thread when it was just at the brink of Romanov. Ivan to make it a point Lenin you know that only the finest puns would have been used. We would never just Fabergé something out of thin air just to Streltsy out a joke, Stalin for time.

As a wise man said: ‘Glasnost what the pun thread can do for you. Ask instead what you can do for the pun thread. Perestroika while the iron is hot.’
He was a famous thinker; the creme de la Kremlin.

Yep, I’m going to be Hammering these out as long as I can, until you’re Sickle of them. Finally, a use for that Russian literature/culture course I did!
(…I can picture my course professor crying if he saw this. He’d be completely Krushev’d.)

Regarding curse words, keep in mind that their frequency also depends on how much stuff there is that may warrant their use. So it may not be a change in your habits with regards to what you swear about.

All due respect to Gimli, but with regards to “cuss” words, there is a significant difference between how many posts contain such words, and how frequently they are used in a given post. A post with one single word used to punctuate a point gives a different perception than one post salted with several uses throughout the content. I’d be curious to see a metric of the average # of cuss words per post for each year, or some other such quantitative evaluation. Maybe you could include the maximum count in a single post for each year as well.

My own casual observation has been a noticeable increase in the use of scatological terms in recent months/years.

Nice: Liferea on Linux. Mine is set up to hit the site every 12 hours, so that gives me about 60 of those 981 hits. The suggested feed interval is 60 minutes, which equates to about 730 hits/month. So there must be at least two other Liferea users subscribed here.